Geneva opened the ACE & Company World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship and World Senior Curling Championships 2026 with a showy ceremony that declared the competitions officially under way and offered one live eagle, two opening stones and a clear line about what the hosts wanted to celebrate.
Rob Niven stepped forward to declare play open and called Geneva "the perfect setting for our sport." At the same moment an eagle — presented as an emblem of the city of Geneva — swooped down to the field of play. Two opening stones were then delivered, breaking from the usual single-stone ritual: one thrown by Anette Norberg of Sweden and the other by Benoit Schwarz-van Berkel, the Olympic bronze medallist and local Swiss favourite.
The scale of the weekend was concrete. The combined event brings athletes from 36 nations to the same rink in Geneva, and the local organising committee said it wanted to celebrate sponsors, volunteers, officials, the city itself and the athletes. Stewart Dryburgh set the tone in his remarks, calling the theme "celebration" and saying Geneva is "more than a pretty city by the lake." He singled out the first-ever Olympic appearance by Estonia's mixed doubles pairing of Marie Kaldvee and Harri Lill and reminded the crowd of the Olympic medal exploits of defending mixed doubles world champions Stefania Constantini and Amos Mosaner.
The ceremony kept its theatrical edge as Wayne Middaugh, Mairi Milne, Hugh Millikin and Stephanie Barbarin assisted with the opening-stone deliveries. Benoit Schwarz-van Berkel, who has Olympic hardware and local ties, delivered his stone to applause. Rob Niven closed the official part of the ceremony by underscoring curling’s social side: "curling is more than competitions — it’s a community and a family. Thank you to Geneva for making this celebration possible."
What happened in Geneva was as much about spectacle as it was about signal. The organisers staged two opening stones instead of the usual one, and the live eagle — a single, dramatic animal presence — was used to tie the sport to the city's imagery. Those details mattered because the local organising committee said the aim was to celebrate the full cast that makes a championship run: not just the athletes on the ice but the volunteers, sponsors and officials who enable the event.
Context matters here: this will be the last time the Seniors and Mixed Doubles Championships are held together. Before this year the two championships were staged jointly, but changes in the international calendar mean the joint format ends after 2026. The combined opening in Geneva was therefore both a launch and a farewell to a format that has folded senior and mixed-doubles curling into a single week at the same venue.
That split is the tension at the heart of the ceremony. The organising committee wanted a festival that paid tribute to everyone involved, but the calendar change means future editions will be separated, reshaping logistics, volunteer schedules and the event atmosphere that comes from having seniors and mixed doubles share an arena. The ceremony acknowledged those stakes even as it celebrated the present: Dryburgh’s shout-outs to first-time Olympic faces and recent world champions felt like bookmarks in a transitional year.
For anyone who arrived in Geneva expecting immediate match results — or who searched headlines such as "Canada Defeats Italy Mixed Doubles" — today’s event was deliberately different. The opening ceremony was not about a single game but about staging and community, and about sending off an era in which these two championships shared a calendar slot.
With the competitions now formally open and athletes from 36 nations ready to compete, the next question for fans and teams is practical: how will the split of the Seniors and Mixed Doubles Championships reshape schedules, travel and the fan experience in 2027 and beyond? For the moment Geneva’s ceremony answered only one thing decisively — as Rob Niven put it, curling here is a family, and Geneva offered a celebration to match.
